Re: KFest 2006 report

["Kirk Mitchell" <kirkmitchell@gmail.com>]

Whew!  Day three!  We stayed up until 2:30 AM, then awoke at 7:30 AM
for breakfast.  Standard fare.

First session had Andy Molloy showing the video "Hackers:Wizards of the
Computer Age".  Interesting early look at such luminaries as Bill
Budge, Woz and others.

Second session had Bruce Baker demonstrating Silvern Castle, a Wizardry
like game written in BASIC by Jeff Fink.  He also demonstrated more 8
bit games from the Softdisk collection.  There are some gems there that
I hadn't realized were there, and I have the collection.

Check out:

http://www.syndicomm.com/~finksterj/SilvernCastle/

and

http://tinyurl.com/jf7m6   (this is the Syndicomm store)

Lunch was hamburgers (mine were better!) , chicken tenders, and other
stuff.  Hmmm... I sure talk a lot about food.  We do eat well.

In the afternoon sessions, Austin Phelps demonstrated Virtual Machines
on PC's.  These will be great on an Intel Mac as well.  I nearly
suffered a bruised forehead when I about smacked it on table when I
dozed off.  I need to make a note to myself to never have a session
right after lunch.  I wasn't the only one knodding, and it wasn't
Austin's fault.  B-{)

Eric Shepherd did a session on Getting Started with ORCA.  It was
basically a quick survey of the wonders of Bytework's great ORCA series
of programming languages and tools.  I really need to get back into the
swing of things programming wise.  The Opus ][ CD that Syndicomm.com
sells is fantastic!

Ryan Suenaga, the Poi Boi from HI, and my KFest roomie, presented the
results of his latest efforts, Volumes 2 and 3 of the GS+ archives!
He's gone to great lengths to get these issues available as searchable
pdf files, complete with all the graphics archives of the disks that
came with these issues.  I got Volume 1 last KFest, and it was great
reading!

OK... more food.  I had fajitas, but there was grilled chicken too.

Afterwards, we went to the KC Apple Store and drooled on their
equipment until they kicked us out.  They had some cute chicks hanging
out around the Genius Bar though, blocking the rest of us from getting
questions answered though.  Tony Diaz even brought an Apple IIc
prototype he wanted to ask them about, but....

A few hours later, Ryan and I went on a Krispy Kreme donut run, and I
succeeded in not getting lost like I did last year.  I was even
successful in securing more barley beverage as well.  B-{)

We were very popular when we got back.  B-{)

Howard Katz had a DVD of a short horror flick, "Stephen King's Gotham
Cafe" which was produced and had short appearances from Woz.
Interesting, but not for the kiddies.  B-{)

http://www.bevvincent.com/gotham.html


Right now, Tony Diaz is running around looking for tools in his efforts
to finish yet another hardware project, the rest of us are sitting in
each other's rooms chatting and joking and making fun of Ken Gagne.
B-{)

Rumor is that Jeri Ellsworth will be here tomorrow.  That'll be cool.
She missed last year, and certainly enlivened the KFests the previous
two times.  All the young geeks around here are in love.  B-{)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth

That's it for now.  Time to see if there are any more donuts left.
B-{)

Kirk